The houses she lambaste are almost exclusively upper-middle class and high-class houses. I think she is railing against lazy/incompetent architects more than the owners of the properties.
Architects build what their clients specify. Those terrible parking garages at the bottom of square high rise towers? Architects hate them, too. But they're what the developers want because they maximize revenue.
With the exception of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van Der Rohe, and a very few others, no architect gets to hear the words "Build what you like."
They aren't. They are from people who are stretching themselves into mortgages and those McMansions in the middle of nowhere are 250k-300k tops. They aren't three million dollar houses.
Yes but in the "middle of nowhere" these houses are owned by the middle-of-nowhere gentry. Saying something that is 300k is not expensive shows a lack of perspective I see a lot in this corner of the internet. Growing up in a rural town, my friends parents rented an apartment multiple towns over because they couldn't afford to live in my town (pop. 5k, surrounded by corn fields). All the problems we think are unique to cities or that we think are more important because there is more money involved really aren't. Everyone has the same problems at different scales.
The problem is that we have a class of intelligentsia such as the author of this piece who thinks she knows better how the rest should live. It is a typical elitist attitude.
300k is not an expensive house. It is 6x 50k/year salary, which is the current not really even stretching for mortgage. In NYC 5k square feet house would cost ~4M if it is in Brooklyn or Queens and it would be much worse than McMansion but I'm sure the OP would be thinking it is wonderful because it is located in NYC.
The fact that you don't even recognize that 50k/year is significantly higher than the median income in many of these places (e.g. 38k in much of Green Bay WI https://www.incomebyzipcode.com/wisconsin/54303) and the fact that you use 6x income when investopedia say that most people can only afford 2-2.5x (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/05/030905.asp) their income shows just how completely out of touch you are.
